![]() This has sometimes gone hand in hand with prescriptions for literature as an ideological ancillary to the aims and results of political revolution. (4) A focus on the connections between class struggle as the inner dynamic of history and literature as the ideologically refracted site of such struggle. If, as Marx said, human beings produce themselves through labor, artistic production can be viewed as a branch of production in general. ![]() (3) The understanding of art itself as a commodity, sharing with other commodities an entry into material aspects of production. Language itself, as Marx said in The German Ideology: Part One, must be understood not as a self-sufficient system but as social practice (GI, 51, 118). “Private property,” for example, is a bourgeois reification of an abstract category it does not necessarily possess eternal validity. What passes as “truth,” then, is not eternal but institutionally created. (2) The view that the so-called “objective” world is actually a progressive construction out of collective human subjectivity. The aesthetic corollary of this is that literature can only be understood in the fullness of its relations with ideology, class, and economic substructure. (1) The rejection, following Hegel, of the notion of “identity” and a consequent denial of the view that any object, including literature, can somehow exist independently. While these responses have sometimes collided at various theoretical planes, they achieve a dynamic and expansive coherence (rather than the static coherence of a closed, finished system) through both a general overlap of political motivation and the persistent reworking of a core of predispositions about literature and art deriving from Marx and Engels themselves. Rather, it has emerged, aptly, as a series of responses to concrete political exigencies. Equally, the subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics has hardly comprised the cumulative unfolding of a coherent perspective. Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. ![]()
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